Detecting submarine groundwater discharge with synoptic surveys of sediment resistivity, radium, and salinity

A synoptic geophysical and geochemical survey was used to investigate the occurrence and spatial distribution of submarine discharges of water to upper Nueces Bay, Texas. The 17 km survey incorporated continuous resistivity profiling; measurements of surface water salinity, temperature, and dissolved oxygen; and point measurements of dissolved Ra isotopes. The survey revealed areas of interleaving, vertical fingers of high and low conductivity extending up through 7 m of bay bottom sediments into the surface water, located within 100 m of surface salinity and dissolved Ra maxima along with peaks in water temperature and lows in dissolved oxygen. These results indicate either brackish submarine groundwater discharge or the leakage of oil field brine from submerged petroleum pipelines

The Vague Feeling of Belonging of a Transcultural Generation : An Ethnographic Study on Germans and their Descendants in Contemporary Helsinki, Finland

Our world has always been shaped by mobility: moving animals and people are crucial for life on earth. Despite this, the overall scale of people moving has changed significantly in the past centuries and decades. The field of migration studies has adapted to this and is no longer only about actual migrants and their seemingly permanent one-way movements. Instead, the perspective has widened and now includes various shades of mobility, both different movements as well as groups of people affected by it. The study at hand provides an innovative approach and a still rather uncommon research setting. It focusses on Germans and their descendants in contemporary Helsinki and asks about the way they (de-)construct boundaries between German- and Finnish-ness, where they position themselves within such frameworks and what personal consequences could emerge from their background and a particular self-positioning. What makes this study novel, especially in contrast to most migration-related research, is that due to the long and intense connection between Finland and Germany the group in question is not regarded as problematic by the majority society. Therefore, their way of positing and feeling of belonging must be seen and interpreted in this specific light. Such a perspective complements the majority of migration studies that often emphasise questions concerning integration of and discrimination against perceived "exotic" and thus "problematic" migrants. With the help of 32 qualitative, semi-structured interviews, the author shows how people with a German-Finnish horizon express their often rather vague feeling of (not-)belonging. Taking the interviewees’ accounts as a point of departure, it became apparent that belongingness depends on many factors including time, place and social surrounding and that it could change several times in a person’s life. The study examines when and how people draw on national categories, only to deconstruct and question them moments later, and furthermore, what impact on a person’s life his/her self-identification could have. By connecting the findings to the relevant literature and to topical issues and discussions, the aim of the study is to emphasise how important it is to see phenomena as part of the big picture, in this case, an intergenerational, societal and historic context. As people’s experiences, emotions and behaviour are heavily influenced by such factors, their understanding becomes only possible when all dots are connected and seen as the inter-connected unit they in fact form.Tämä tutkimus käsittelee saksalaisia ja heidän jälkeläisiään nykypäivän Helsingissä. Se käsittelee kysymyksiä, kuten miten he purkavat raja-aitoja (omasta näkökulmastaan) saksalaisuuden ja suomalaisuuden väliltä, miten he asettavat itsensä vastaaviin viitekehyksiin ja mitä seuraamuksia heidän taustastaan ja kyseisestä viitekehykseen asemoitumisesta voi seurata. Suomen ja Saksan historiallisesti läheisen suhteen seurauksena kyseistä ryhmää ei pidetä ongelmallisena kantaväestön keskuudessa. Tästä syystä saksalaisten ja heidän jälkeläistensä asemointia suomalaiseen yhteiskuntaan ja kuuluvuuden kokemustaan pitää tarkastella erityisessä valossa. Tämä näkökulma täydentää valtaosaa maahanmuuttotutkimuksesta, joka keskittyy lähinnä ”eksoottisina” ja siten ”ongelmallisina” pidettyjen maahanmuuttajien integraatioon ja heidän kokemaansa syrjintään. Yhdistämällä tulokset asiaankuuluvaan kirjallisuuteen ja yhteiskunnalliseen keskusteluun, tutkimuksen tarkoituksena on painottaa, kuinka tärkeää on nähdä ilmiö osana suurempaa kokonaisuutta, tässä tapauksessa sukupolvien välistä, yhteiskunnallista ja historiallista kontekstia

The recruitment and recognition of prior informal experience in the pedagogy of two university courses in labour law

Includes bibliographical references.This thesis explores the epistemological complexities associated with the long-standing principle in adult education that the experience of the adult student should be valued, taken account of and built upon in the pedagogic process, to the extent that it can even be 'recognized' for purposes of access or credit. It asks how prior experience is recruited and recognized in a higher education context where commitment to the adult student is espoused but the curriculum is non-negotiable . Multiple research methods are used to pursue this question in two courses in Labour Law at separate universities . One, a certificate course, had admitted students with Grade 10 or less. The other, a post-graduate diploma, had admitted students without degrees. The thesis opens with a discussion of the ways in which formal and informal knowledge have been constructed in various theories of knowledge and thought, as well as in discourses on the Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL). Thereafter, drawing on Bernstein, Dowling and Bourdieu , and in dialogue with the empirical data, a language of localizing and generalizing strategies is developed to identify various forms of informal and formal knowledge and to describe their interplay. The range and interrelationships of these strategies is shown in the form of semantic networks. Attention is paid to the structure of law and its sub-field labour law as fields of practice and of study and it is noted that both are characterized by a deductive relationship between formal and informal knowledge. The practice of law is essentially about the application of rules, concepts and principles to actual events (a deductive process) while the development of laws themselves is in response to social conditions (an inductive process). There is always the potential for inequity between the generality of the law and the particularities of an individual case. The courses differ in the extent to which they follow the deductive logic of the practice of law. It is argued that the higher level course which explores the complexities of labour law and its application to actual reported cases and events, is closer to that logic than the lower level course which presents the law in terms of sets of rules and procedures and tries to simplify its application by the use of the hypothetical. The postgraduate course also offers students an opportunity to recruit prior experience in assignments, even though it has to be researched and recontextualized for the purpose. The research finds that both lecturers and students use localizing strategies, including the recruitment of prior personal experience. Three different pedagogic styles are identified, with the recruitment and recognition of prior informal experience as a major feature of variation . The lecturers' localizations have a generalizing trajectory in that they are expressed in relation to general rules, principles or concepts or case law. The localizations of students who have mastered or submitted themselves to the recognition and realization rules of the courses have a similar trajectory. A few students show a localizing trajectory, limited to personalizing strategies often used to challenge the general rule by asserting the particularity and difference of personal experience. These localizing orientations are associated with very limited formal education but not exclusively so. They are also associated with expectations that prior informal experience is valuable in a formal educational context and will be recognized. This promise, engendered by discourses on RPL and adult education, obfuscates the transmission/acquisition purposes of a formal education programme. The theoretical contribution of the thesis lies with the language of description which it develops to analyse the interplay between the multiple dimensions of formal and informal knowledge. The research also has important implications for two theories of Basil Bernstein's. It shows that it is difficult to identify horizontal discourse empirically and to separate it from vertical discourse. The two are inextricably intertwined. The discussion of students' orientation to the local and the general shows the relevance of Bernstein's notions of elaborated and restricted codes to adult education. At the same time it exposes the crudity of these notions, showing, through fine-tuned analysis, the multiple different ways in which context-dependent and -independent knowledge is combined in practice. Finally, the research shows that students with limited formal education can and do succeed in formal education programmes. Factors influencing their achievement include the nature of their work experience and the extent to which it has exposed them to formal literacies, and dispositional factors including a willingness to accept pedagogic hierarchy, to assume an individual rather than collective identity and to expend symbolic labour

Looking Back, or Re-visioning: Contemporary American Jewish Poets on “Lot’s Wife”

Although mentioned only twice in Genesis (19:17, 26), Lot’s wife has been a topic of much discussion amongst both traditional and modern commentators and exegetes. The traditional midrashim seek to explain why she chose to disregard the instructions she was given and the nature of her punishment. In doing so, they follow two principal directions, representing her a) negatively as a wicked sinner, a Sodomite who acted as such even before disobeying the divine decree not to look backwards—thus linking her disobedience with her intrinsic character (e.g., curious, greedy, inhospitable, faithless); or b) positively as a loving mother and daughter. However, as opposed to the androcentric traditional midrash, the Jewish American women poets, who write midrashic-poetry, re-read the biblical story with a feminine/feminist lens, making what Alicia Ostriker calls “revisionist mythmaking.” As such, they very rarely take the first route, almost always highlighting Lot’s wife’s positive—female—aspects. In this article, I shall analyze nine poems written by American Jewish women poets from the 1980s until 2015, who draw on the biblical text in order to deal with contemporary issues or contextualize it in the modern period